Minority Outreach

Raw Story:  Republican Rep. Don Young of Alaska on Thursday used a racial slur during an interview with a local radio station.

“My father had a ranch. We used to hire 50 or 60 wetbacks to pick tomatoes,” Young said in the interview with KRBD. “You know, it takes two people to pick the same tomatoes now. It’s all done by machine.”

Does anybody have any doubt about how he refers to black people?  But back to the native people for a moment, you've got to love the GOP, white Europeans come here, murder the natives, steal the land, call them racist names, and in general demonize and terrorize them, all the while happily letting them pick our produce, flip our burgers, and do our gardening.  What a bunch of scumbags.   

Scary

Huffingtonpost: Media attendees at Rep. Doug LaMalfa's (R-Calif.) first town hall were left with a head-scratcher.

The Redding Record-Searchlight reported late Monday that a Tea Party group instituted a blackout during the scheduled Q&A section of LaMalfa's appearance. The paper claims that it was also asked to refrain from tweeting his comments, or face a potential ban from future events. 

KRCR-TV adds that the following ground rules were set by a Tea Party organizer before LaMalfa's event: no filming of the congressman's introduction or the Q&A session, as well as a request for the TV station to exit before that latter portion of the event began.

It's come down to this.  The leading edge of the GOP is so toxic, so revolting, so off putting, that they can't even let people hear what they're saying.  

Lib Media Not Racist Enough

Daily Kos:  Robert Zimmerman, Jr., brother of Trayvon Martin shooter George Zimmerman, is on a media offensive, with definite emphasis on the offensive, to defend his brother with racists attacks on his brother's victim. That includes a Twitter campaign in which he repeatedly tweets images of Trayvon Martin along with those of a young, black man who's been detained in Georgia for the murder of an infant.

Both pictures feature the young men flipping the middle finger at the camera, with the caption “A picture speaks a thousand words…Any questions?” Zimmerman has, thus far, tweeted the comparison to the Anthony half of Opie and Anthony, Michael Moore, the NAACP, and a Breitbart News editor, as well as the NRA. If Zimmerman’s point is that anyone who uses that gesture is a murderer, then they’re going to have to arrest the entire Garden State Parkway. If you suspect that wasn’t his point, you might be right.

To make absolutely sure that his point was being made, Zimmerman also tweeted out this:

Lib media shld ask if what these2 black teens did 2 a woman&baby is the reason ppl think blacks mightB risky

We wouldn't have bothered with this except to notice the Zimmerman camp appears to be conservative (right?  lib media?).  Which would explain the racism anyway...

Death Toll + 1

Raw Story:  The former head of the South Carolina Republican Party on Sunday lashed out at an Iraq war veteran who now opposes the war, saying that he should have “come home in a body bag.”

So the GOP lies us into a devastating war and occupation, one of the people who didn't die as a result has a problem with it, and the former head of the SC GOP wishes he would have been one of the hundreds of thousands who did die because of what they did.  What a rotten movement. 

Race War!

During a roundtable discussion on Friday, Fox News’ Lou Dobbs agreed with a network contributor who argued that Americans need to access military-style assault weapons to protect themselves from an Iranian invasion.

Ridiculous.  Anyway, everybody knows right-wing gun nuts hoard munitions of war not to protect themselves against a foreign invasion, but instead to prepare for insurrection against our own government.  Fact of the matter is the civil war didn't turn out quite like they had hoped and they want another bite at the apple.  A multi-cultural and upwardly mobile society runs contrary to their core beliefs and they openly fantasize about taking it over in a blaze of gun glory.  Republican party leadership encourages mistrust of government by the people and the fact this crowd is more partial to the Confederate flag than the American flag should be a giant red flag at the voting booth. 

Keepin' em' Stupid

Think Progress:  For five years since the Great Recession, states have drastically cut funding for public universities, with long-lasting consequences for the U.S. economy. A new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities finds that every state except North Dakota and Wyoming is spending less per student than before the recession. As a result, students are paying much higher tuition, while quality of education has suffered from faculty cuts, closed campuses, eliminated course offerings and shut down educational resources like libraries and computer labs.

This is a simple yet highly illustrative picture of Republican rule.  We all know they're anti-science, basically hate public education, and publicly brand anybody who's highly educated as some kind of foreign elite.  They've spent the entire Obama presidency getting rid of as many public school teachers as possible. They're happy to see sequestration result in even less education. 

Undereducated populations provide the conservative movement with Walmart/drive through/McJob wage slaves and they don't think too critically about the crappy results of Republican party public policy.  But they kill the country.

Public education is a vital and indespensible investment in the future competitiveness of the nation and a pillar of upward mobility.  It's an investment that pays off many time over.  Only people who are not actually interested in the success of the country, or the ideal of the American dream, would cut it to pay for tax cuts for the super-rich and the transnational corporation.  Remember that when you vote. 

Fascists

Daily Kos:  Emily Ramshaw at the Texas Tribune writes:

As recently as 2003, the president of the Greater Fort Bend County Tea Party had a very different title: director of propaganda for the American Fascist Party. James Ives, a prominent Tea Party activist who has hosted statewide rallies and political debates and has been a regular contributor on conservative radio, was the AFP's fourth in command, commenting about the party’s principles on a fascist message board. An image of Ives in what appears to be a black uniform with yellow shoulder patches can be seen in a 2006 promotional video for the party.

Ives tells a more nuanced story; the Richmond, Texas, resident says he stumbled across the fascist party — which supports extreme right-wing authoritarian regimes — online in the early 2000s as an “amateur political science student and frustrated novelist” and was merely curious.

We have long said the GOP is a fascist political party.  We would like to thank James Ives for helping to make that case. 

Still With Us

Huffingtonpost:  Days after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Tomas Young, then a 22-year-old from Kansas City, Mo., made a decision repeated by many other Americans around the country: He was going to enlist in the military in hopes of getting even with the enemies who had helped coordinate the deaths of nearly 3,000 men, women and children.

Less than three years later, Young's Army service placed him not in Afghanistan -- where then-President George W. Bush had told the nation the terrorist plot had originated -- but in Iraq. On April 4, 2004, just five days into his first tour, Young's convoy was attacked by insurgents. A bullet from an AK-47 severed his spine. Another struck his knee. Young would never walk again, and in fact, for the next nearly nine years, he would suffer a number of medical setbacks that allowed him to survive only with the help of extensive medical procedures and the care of his wife, Claudia.

The incident turned Young into one of the most vocal veteran critics of the Iraq War. He has, however, saved his most powerful criticism for what he claims will be his last. Young says he'll die soon, but not before writing a letter to Bush and former Vice President Cheney on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War.   From Young's letter, published on TruthDig:

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Powerful stuff.  But it wasn't just Bush and Cheney.  It was the entire GOP establishment that pushed us into this tragedy.  They all felt it would be good for their political fortunes and in fact they used it to get elected, raise money, and pay their cronies, for multiple election cycles.  Most of those people are still Washington DC Republicans.   

Wage Slavers

TPM: House Republicans unanimously voted down a measure Friday that would have raised the federal minimum wage, from its current $7.25 per hour to $10.10 by 2015.

Every-single-damn-one-of-them.  Well, they have their masters and their masters tell them not pass any law that says they have to pay people above poverty wages.  This is bad for the economy because the people getting minimum wage would pretty much be forced to spend the extra money, and it's bad for the GOP because this will make God hate them even more. 

How's He Voting On Gay Rights Issues?

Raw Story: A Anti-marijuana Republican lawmaker in New York who has a record of voting against medical marijuana legalization has been arrested and charged with possession of marijuana.

That's just great.  Vote to put people in jail for doing something medically helpful while you're doing the same thing for recreation.  Typical conservative.  Usually we hear of anti-gay conservatives caught being gay, so this is just another variation on that theme.  Hopefully this is the end of his career.

Terrorist

WASHINGTON: -- Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex) says that he is expecting a vote Wednesday on his amendment to defund Obamacare until economic growth is restored, adding that he is willing to risk a government shutdown if Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and President Barack Obama stand in the way.

This is ridiculous. You don't get to hold the government hostage like that.  That's what terrorists do.  The GOP lost the election.  The American people want affordable healthcare. That's the way they voted.  To hold them hostage at the point of the gun that is the for-profit medical industry massive profit margins, and threaten their government, should really disqualify him from public.   

Additionally, we do have economic growth.  We have restored growth with our Democratic public policy.  It had to be restored because his team put us into complete economic and fiscal meltdown with the same public policy he's advocating for right now.  He's being deceptive by implying otherwise. 

Last, he's pushing public policy that history has already proven to be a disaster for the country.

Quite a guy...

Businessmen

Huffingtonpost:  Less than a week after Costco CEO Craig Jelinek spoke out in favor of raising the minimum wage, the big-box retailer’s earnings showed that paying workers a living wage doesn’t always hurt business. 

Costco reported a profit of $537 million last quarter, up from $394 million during the same period last year, according to the Wall Street Journal. The healthy earnings report comes just six days after Jelinik urged lawmakers to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. 

We here at GT know people who work at Costco.  By all accounts it's a pretty good place to work.  One reason is they pay significantly better than their competitors. They employ a lot of people, most of whom live in the community.  It's no surprise paying a living wage increases demand in the local economy.  Henry Ford would have been proud.

Because They Don't Represent This Country

Raw Story:  A Fox News guest who took on Sean Hannity for blasting President Barack Obama even as employment dropped to the lowest level in more than four years reaveled on Tuesday that the conservative host and others at Fox News are “so upset” that the economy is recovering.

They are of course upset.  From a political perspective it's a blow that yet again history has demonstrated Democratic public policy to be far better for the country than Republican public policy.  We're always cleaning up their mess.

It's not so much they want the country to fail, but more that the transnational and super rich interests they represent don't give a rip when it does.  So from the Republican perspective the most important thing is to gain power to serve those narrow interests.  In order to do that, they must destroy the president, his party, and his policies.  And since it's the Presidents Democratic policies that have turned around the Republican meltdown of 2009/2009, a power transfer from the Democrats to the Republicans will again put us in grave economic danger.  Obviously. 

Who's Side Are They On?

CNN on the Ryan budget:  The plan, which contains many of the same provisions he offered last year, hits all the GOP high notes: less spending, lower tax rates and a rejection of most of President Obama's health reforms.
 
We can summarize his plan in one sentence: We're going to steal the money you've paid into Medicare and throw the poor, the middle class, and future competitiveness of the country under the bus so we can pay for tax cuts for the very rich and the transnational corporation. 

Drone Truths

Washington Post:  One of the oldest and most storied traditions of the Senate made a sudden return to Capitol Hill on Wednesday when a junior senator seized control of the chamber with an hours-long ­filibuster involving rambling speeches aimed at blocking a vote on President Obama’s choice to lead the CIA.

Led by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) with help from other junior senators, the filibuster stretched nearly 13 hours — with the Senate adjourning at about 12:40 a.m. Thursday — and was aimed at drawing attention to deep concern on both sides of the aisle about the administration’s use of unmanned aerial drones in its fight against terrorists and whether the government would ever use them in the United States.

We're not a fan of drone war here or there, but it's interesting to note a couple things, 1) Republicans went from saying they're hunting to terrorists to trying to make Obama a villain for hunting the same terrorists, and 2) now that conservatives have flip flopped back onto the civil liberties bandwagon, there are no Democrats accusing them of being soft on terrorists or national security or any of that other fascist garbage the GOP hurled our way the entire Cheney presidency. 

Right-Wing Blood Money

A Republican state lawmaker in Georgia on Thursday introduced a bill that would relax gun restrictions on people who have been treated for mental illness.

Here's the bottom line, the Republican party has made a decision to trade the lives of tens of thousands of Americans every year for the ill-gotten gains of their pimps in the NRA and the gun industry.  Everything they do regarding guns make this more than clear.   As a matter of fact, pretty much everything they do, be it with particulate air pollution, heathcare reform, war, whatever, starts with the same motivation and ends with the same results. 

Bush III

Raw Story:  After years of building a reputation as the “good” Republican on immigration, Jeb Bush shocked the reform community on Monday by ruling out a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, a position solidly to the right of prominent GOPers like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). 

Looks like we're going to have another Bush running for president.  This is for the GOP primary voters and nobody else.  And it's going to work.  They will pick Jeb Bush over Marco Rubio.  The Latino community also should take note: the base of the Republican party doesn't want you here and the establishment GOP will throw you under the bus to get elected.  Best you make sure they don't.

King Scalia

Scalia on the Voting Rights Act:  "I think it attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement."

 “They (congress) are going to lose votes if they do not reenact the Voting Rights Act. Even the name of it is wonderful — the Voting Rights Act. Who is going to vote against that in the future?”

“This is not the kind of question you can leave to Congress,”

Yep, how dare those negroes feel their entitled to vote.  Just add this to the rest of the conservative efforts to keep them from doing so.  As for his view he should be appropriating the role of the democratically elected  legislature and executive branches of government, that should disqualify him from being on the court.  He should be impeached immediately.  It's a dangerous thing to have a judge who thinks he's a king.